The Internet has had a profound effect on people's lives and on modern society in general. Starting as a limited network that linked a few universities in the late 1960s, a precursor to the modern Internet known as ARPANET initially offered email services and library lookup. The Internet later evolved to offer different kinds of services that support people in various facets of their lives. One aspect of the modern Internet, the World Wide Web (“the Web”), includes massive storage of digitally represented information and services including hyperlinked webpages that can be instantly shared between physically distant individuals. Typically, a user uses a computing device (e.g., desktop computer, notebook computer, smartphone, etc.) to run a web browser which enables her to request to view a particular webpage, e.g., entering an IP address or a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or by following a hyperlink (also referred to as a link) from another webpage or program. The data for the requested webpage is retrieved from a web server and rendered at the web browser for display to the user. Companies, individuals, or other entities may have a website, which is a collection of webpages interconnected by hyperlinks. The experience of “visiting” websites without physically having to move (e.g., from the comfort of one's home) is unique to the Internet era.
With the advent of the Web, social networks, educational services, arts and even simple comments have become just a click away even for people in remote locations with little access to other modern services. But, a person still has to make that click, i.e., access the desired webpage, for the Web experience to be helpful. As discussed above, one way to access a webpage is to manually type in the URL, but that practice is becoming rare, particularly because of the likelihood of spelling errors and because it is difficult to know what the URL associated with specific content may be.
The sheer size of the Internet and Web led to the development of search engines, which aid people browsing the web in finding webpages that contain information that they desire or need. A surfer enters a search query, and the search engine generates and displays a list of addresses (Uniform Resource Locators URLs) and/or hyperlinks to those addresses. The results (hits) generated by a search engine are typically displayed in style reminiscent of traditional phone directories, with many pages each containing a number of search hits.
Referring to FIG. 1, a typical user experience regarding search results is as follows. A web browser displays a search engine's results page 110, and the surfer clicks (or pressing, or otherwise selecting) one of the search results in the list, e.g., webpage 120-1. The surfer may review webpage 120-1 for desired goals (i.e., whether the page contains the information that the surfer desired to find through the search process), and if the surfer is not satisfied, she returns to the static search results page 110 to review other search hits. In this manner, the surfer may visit webpages 120-2, 120-3, and 120-4 in turn, each time returning to results page 110 before trying another search result. In this way, a surfer may spend most of the time reviewing the search engine's page 110. Such a search experience can be laborious and frustrating from the surfer's perspective, particularly because the search engine may have returned many pages of search results. Although the hits displayed at results page 110 may be ranked in some order by a search algorithm, the surfer still has to cull through the hits to determine which, if any, webpages she will visit, and to determine an order in which to visit them.